Chapter 2: How Your Hardware, Operating System, and Applications Work Together

Overview

Ever construct one of those great domino structures where you use dozens of pieces to make an elaborate design? If you have, then you know how difficult it can be to create it, only to have to pull one piece out without sending a rippling effect through everything in the chain.

A friend of mine likens the whole PC setup to such a game of dominoes, especially today when computing design has evolved into such an integrated system. He says that if you break or damage one piece of the PC puzzle, you’ll feel it throughout your PC. I think there’s something to be said for this analogy, and I bet you do, too.

I’m telling you this because you’re likely to encounter this issue with PC work—either in run-of-the-mill problems or when recovering from a major disaster. PC integration makes it easy to set things up initially. For example, plug in a piece of hardware and Windows usually detects that something new has been installed and prompts you to install its driver. But the Windows infrastructure that creates such convenience can sometimes make it tougher to diagnose and fix problems in an emergency.

Unless you can appreciate the inter-connections of almost everything on and in a PC, it’ll be harder for you to do the work necessary to get a disaster-ed system back up. You’ll hear the old refrain about “taking things one step at a time” often in this book because following that old adage helps you avoid the pitfalls of integration.

Toward that end, this chapter focuses on helping you understand the role of the three major components of any working computer:

• the PC hardware itself (the box, the monitor, and anything attached to the box)

• the operating system

• the applications installed to the operating system

Take a deep breath and jump into the first section.